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The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".
The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.
As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.
Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.
A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.
In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232
[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:25PM
Perhaps somewhat provocative but.. Let the engineers do their work and keep everybody else out of the way?
And bar any open office with lot's of noises and attention poking, worthless meetings, useless "information", rigid hours instead of accomplishment goals etc.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:29PM
Younger engineers love open offices.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:50PM
Perhaps that shows in their coding performance too? especially in tricky corner cases..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BK on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:25PM
I'd like to believe that the less productive activities are what make those short bursts possible and most appropriately directed.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:26AM
I'd like to believe that the less productive activities are what make those short bursts possible and most appropriately directed.
You can end it right here, this is it. No matter how much a corporation might wish it were so, people are not machines and can not just "power on", run for X hours, and then "power off" at the end of the day. Trying to force that burns us out and makes us less productive, not more, because we can't manage that sort of constant, long-term focus without negative effects. This is especially true with problem-solving, where doing other things can be productive despite seeming to not be because your mind's still working at the problem in the background. Same idea as sleeping on a problem and waking up with fresh insight, basically.
Of course, it's easy to use that as an excuse to fuck around and get nothing done, and then the PHBs see the slackers doing that and think "look at how much time you're wasting! You could be doing 4x the work!" and then use that as justification to put extra pressure on everybody, to the detriment of all.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by martyb on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:37PM
Because wasting time at home doesn't pay as well?
Okay, I'll let myself out now. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:55PM
I swear nothing kills time more than meetings! WHY must we have so many?
I think there are people who really believe work gets done through meetings, because that's all they do all day. But when you're a producer, not a talker, you CAN'T work until people shut up and leave you alone!
Micromanagers -- and not even in your "leadership ladder" -- want to peer over your shoulder to measure every inch of progress. So you spend more time measuring and reporting than doing.
I long ago gave up making sense of it. I tolerate it. And if I can find a rare 20 minutes uninterrupted I can usually finish half a week's worth of task completion. Not that it's a real half week's work, but that's all the chance I'm gonna get this week.
Next up: assigning 100 things then canceling 89 of them after hours are invested but before completion lets that investment bear fruit. WHY?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:06PM
Back in my working days I got to the office between 6 and 7 AM. I got more done by 9 than I did the rest of the day.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:09PM
Nothing has changed. You only really get important things done at work before 9 am or after 5 pm. The rest of the time is just an endless stream of meetings and interruptions.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:57PM
Yes... get in before the 'head office' can fu*k you up, or stay after they have gone home.
In between, youu will be placing your head between your kneesand vomiting.
and yes, alcohol affects your tyoping!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:03PM
Stay at home and work?
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:29AM
Great thing about working internationally. When I'm in Singapore it's 1500 before the first emails start arriving, and by the time
The bulk arrive in already on my second beer.
If I'm working in the states the emails tend to dry up about 1.00p givingr the whole afternoon uninterrupted.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:10AM
I's been quite a while (see post above) since I did the corporate dance, but I knew damn well that all the Corporate managers, from VP up, left the office by 2PM latest. So no changes were going come down till around 8AM next day.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:53AM
Yes (Ok I'm aging myself), but 40 years ago (before I went self-employed) when I was working in a couple of large outfits in Sillycone Valley, Most of my real work was done by 9:00 ~ 10:00 AM. As both companies had several campuses, I could always check out after lunch with the secretary and head back over the hill to Santa Cruz and the beach or harbor. On occasion I'd get a page and would have to find the nearest payphone (google it) to check in. Then I'd just say, "I'm in transit between sites, just call me me at 7 AM in the morning and we'll work it out". Never had a problem.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 5, Funny) by tynin on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:15PM
Are you lonely?
Tired of working on your own?
Do you hate making decisions?
HOLD A MEETING!
You can --
- See people
- Show charts
- Feel important
- Point with a stick
- Eat donuts
- Impress your colleagues
All on company time!
MEETINGS
The Practical Alternative To Work
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:26PM
Sorry for the self-reply, but I'm having flashbacks to a death march of all-day meetings, back to back.
They were convened by a flock of "assistant vice presidents" who flew out from New York to show us the light. We even had a "meeting facilitator" who demonstrated her value by covering every wall of the room by the end of every day with large sheets of paper containing her notes, just to show how much we had "accomplished". Of course, they were all taken down the next morning to make room for another crop.
The first and most important thing to understand was that "it" must be done by June 30, because we want to be the first to market, and we've got a big advertising buy "landing" on June 30.
The flock knew absolutely nothing about web design; it seemed unlikely that they'd ever even used a web site themselves. (1998) But they knew it absolutely must be cool, so they could brag to their rivals at dinner parties. Also it had to be "engaging".
And "compelling". Hey! We're almost treading on the edge of a requirement here. It should "compel" people to do what?
Why to build brand loyalty, of course.
I shut up and stopped asking questions.
After a great deal of agonizing debate, limited exclusively to the "assistant vice presidents", we finally "gained consensus" on the "creative". In other words, what color should the font be? No functionality, though.
When the marathon was finally over -- during which time we'd never been out of their sight during business hours long enough to do more than potty -- they turned to the developers and said "So, is it done yet?"
Done? We said. If you'll go away now maybe we can start.
Oh, I thought we were quite clear that it must be done by June 30. What have you been waiting for?
Ummm, you to shut up?
Arrggggggghhhh!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by boristhespider on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:41PM
If this was 98 you might have just been early enough to avoid the enormous joy that is "Agile". As far as I can see, an Agile "Sprint" is this:
Day 1: Convene at the start of the day to look through the list of tasks the project manager has set for the next two weeks. Spend two hours talking about the "effort" involved in each task, the number of hours involved in each "task", and then spend a few hours splitting them into sub-tasks and putting against them an idea of the "effort" and number of hours that would be consumed in this task, ensuring that it matches the previous estimate. Argue that the "effort" that has been forced upon you by the product manager are meaningless, since it's very likely that the code needing to be modified for these tasks will have unexpected tendrils in every other part of the code, in unpredictable ways. Having burned a good couple of hours, go away and task everything out a bit more carefully. Reconvene, and go through the entire fucking process again. Net result of day 1: totally fuck all; we've wasted the whole day arguing about whether task 5 is trivial or whether it involves a full redesign of one of our systems and would take three sprints. (Obviously, the latter.)
Days 2-13: Attempt to do some work in between the meetings set up for this Sprint, meetings set up for other Sprints you're not in but are expected to devote work torwards (apparently from your bottomless resource of free time given everything was evidently tasked out for a different Sprint on Day 1). Having started on a couple of the tasks assigned to you on Day 1, revise all the time estimates in light of the absurd existing software design, making a total mockery of the "effort" estimates that were forced upon you but which cannot be revised.
Day 14: Have a wrap-up, in which you present about a third of the work that was forced upon you on Day 1. In the retrospective afterwards, point out that the "effort" is a pointless piece of bureaucratic pish that simply wastes time and applies unnecessary pressure, and that "original time estimates" are not just degenerate with "effort" -- to the repeated denials of the Scrum Master and the Product Manager who appear, themselves, to be in denial -- but are equally useless and pressure forming. Point out that had we not burned Day 1 in "planning" and in making pointless estimates of "effort" and hours involved, and been allowed to jettison obviously unrealistic tasks in favour of the realistic, and Day 14 in wrapping up and painful navel-gazing that will be entirely ignored come the following working day, we might have got a bit more done and certainly have had far fewer missed objectives.
Day 15: Declare that both "Agile" and "Scrum" are a pile of fucking shit, and merely new words for the same old crap - and that it would be easier all around to simply give me a set of tasks to do on Day 1, discuss how realistic they are for the next release, and then review again on Day 14 - and get reprimanded by a management who inexplicably love it, despite having been in the development teams less than a year before.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:27PM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
And you're right about "effort". Our project management system is supposed to have a bunch of tasks for every project. But of course that would mean work for the PMs to detail out all those tasks. So instead we get a single task named "Project Work Effort Reporting". Clearly you're not supposed to do anything, other than report your "effort". And of course once you've reported an amount equal to the absurdly-randomly-predicted "effort", the project will be done, right?
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:38PM
Thankfully we don't have the "Project Work Effort Reporting" - and for full disclosure, my own product manager appears to have a reasonable contempt for this, so that these days my kick-offs are about 30 minutes to an hour long, and generally "effort" involves him asking "how long will this take?", listening to the reply, believing it, and dicking around with priorities and otherwise leaving us alone. This is a blessed relief after the year before it, and most likely after he's either moved on or succumbed to the bullshit, especially as the (junior) member of staff who has been appointed "SCRUM master" is predictably, tediously and nauseatingly gung-ho for this crap.
I think I might start trying the "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X." I might drop "finally" - that would lend a wonderful ambiguity as to whether (as they believe) they had provided a requirement at the start, or whether they've only just provided one now, without getting me accused of criticising management....
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:49AM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
Duh, of course it won't consume as much time. "Agile" and "sprint" are fast words! Naming your meetings with fast words mean they get done faster, anybody knows that. It's just like a joke I made recently about people using Apple's Swift language because the name obviously means everything's faster -- development, testing, and performance, all faster! -- because sometimes people really do believe that sort of nonsense.
See also the tendency to rename companies and products to get rid of bad reputation. Fix the problems? Nah, just rename it and hope nobody notices.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:00PM
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
This. I always ended up having to slap something together that included all the vague ideas that came from management, then adjusting it finally to do what they actually wanted and get rid of the rest. Some wasted work, but much less frustrating than trying to pin down management ahead of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:42AM
If you want to find out where all this numb-nuts crap came from, find yourself a torrent of The Trap, and English documentary that looks at the origins of quantifiable performance objectives as part of the modern world.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:02PM
Because meetings are prime politics-playing time. If you're somebody who's sole contribution is badmouthing people low on the totem pole while sucking up to people high on the totem pole, what better place to do it than in a room full of higher-ups?
Anyone with a brain knows nothing truly gets accomplished for the organization during a meeting, but an organization's goals and the goals of individuals within that organization are frequently at odds with each other.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:06PM
Wife with children. Yeah.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:03AM
Based on several couples I've known, "children" is the key word in that sentence regardless of which parent is at home & which is employed. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @10:08PM
If that is the case, you are doing it wrong.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tynin on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:09PM
I used to be someone like the article describes. Now days, I leave the office on time. I put my 8 hours in, and as long as nothing revenue generating is broken, I go home and enjoy my life. At least at the company I work now (and in the past, makes me think many are this way), they'd love for you to work nights and weekends for free, but everyone gets the same shitty ~1.5% - ~2% raise. Farcical yearly reviews that end up lumping everyone toward average or lower due to shit made up on the spot, or trivialities turned tempest in a teapot.
Let the kids and the delusional keep drinking that company Koolaid, meanwhile I'll be home hugging on my wife and drinking a lovely Long Island Ice Tea.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:13PM
I know of at least two men who keep 'putting in the hours' to avoid their problems at home. One who was married with kids, but his relationship with his wife had become unrecoverable, but the costs and stress of divorce scared him even more. By being at work she couldn't nag him or complain about him being lazy. Another was an unhappy alcoholic who found some sense of meaning and purpose in his work, but really all he did for his 'bonus time' was catch up on Reddit and Fark.
As for me, my workstation has more horsepower and RAM than the box at home, so I VPN into it and thus appear I'm always working thanks to sending Outlook emails (not mobile ones) at all hours. I can smell the promotion coming. Or is that the stench of burnout?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:22PM
Like my bumper sticker says "Managers are like diapers, full of shit and all over your ass". After 40 years at various jobs, I've only had one manager that was worth a shit, and got work done without a bunch of useless bullshit. All the others stick their nose in your work telling you how to do your job, without knowing what the hell they're talking about, useless meetings, and pawning his work off on others and taking credit for it. One of them almost got the business closed due to lowest profit in the company, he was the only one replaced and the business shot up to the top producer in the state.
(Score: 1) by jrial on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:52PM
There are good and bad managers, and I've worked for both. My current one is great. We share some smokes outside, we chat about the company or even personal stuff, and concerning my work, he just trusts me to do good work on my projects, but never checks up on me, just let's me work with the functionals who wrote the requirements and he just stays out of my hair. It's not often I left a company and including my manager in the list of people I'll miss, but since I got a better offer closer to home...
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:47PM
In most offices, performing useful work is a sure way to get yourself labeled a peon for the rest of your career. The socializing is what leads to privileges and promotion, and thus it is no surprise that most workers focus on it.
This is especially true at larger firms, where management usually has no clue who is doing any actual work.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:10PM
Bingo, bango, b0ng0... those who pretend to work and do what their supervisors want, will go uup witht the superivsors.
those acutally doing the work will languish unless they get a manager who acutlly aappreciates the work they do.
Shit rolls down hill.,.. the manager stands in the way and catches it or they shovel it down onto yuou...
I'm glad my manager stands inthe way and let us do our job.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:12PM
Remember kids...don't drink and post.,
Wowl I suck.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:25PM
Based on the counts in various email folders, and the average time per message, over the past year my employer has paid me more than $5,000 to read emails that had nothing to do with any of the work I had been assigned. Just noise. Rah-rah. Happy crappy etc.
Again, WHY?
I'm really amazed that the economy works at all, with the oceans of stupidity and waste sloshing about.
(Score: 1) by rleigh on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:40PM
I am continually amazed that employers actually consider email to be beneficial for productivity. I honestly do wonder if the days of physical pieces of paper in pigeonholes and in/out trays wasn't better, if nothing else simply because it had limits on how much of the stuff could be physically shovelled around an organisation and the general post, and as such was self-limiting. Email seems to have no reasonable limits, and the ability for individuals to keep up and meaningfully deal with the deluge is limited.
In my first job, while there was no general email, employees were expected to log into the E-MEMO system of an IBM AS/400 for company- and site-wide messages (on real 5250 token ring terminals). Even then we had a certain amount of useless stuff--someone left their car lights on in the head office car park 300 miles away? Maybe sending out a message company-wide is a waste of thousands of people's time? But even with that the number of messages was 1-2 per day and were more often than not directly useful for current site work, or were company/site-wide announcements. It was manageable and it served its purpose; total time per week was minimal. Productivity impact was negligable.
Today I find I am getting many hundreds per day, from automated messages from lots of computer systems and services to many useless messages from many different people, to several mailing lists. I find it totally unmanageable. There's a limit to how much communication an individual can deal with, let alone even respond to, and still get anything actually productive done. I would hazard that I delete 90% without reading, 9.9% after reading, and keep ~0.1 which is the stuff I can actually action and respond to. Which begs the question: why is it considered acceptable to have every employee deluged with this spew of crap? It's "communication" of a sort, but it's not "effective" communication--information I *need* to know and can do something with. And yet I'm often asked for details about one of the random emails I deleted; while I'm probably over-zealous about deleting stuff, I find the expectation that I can immediately recall the details of one email out of several hundred thousand a little unrealistic.
I can't help but feel we haven't really discovered the most effective way to organise our communication. There are so many jobs which are unnecessarily burdened with make-work like this, which isn't really good for the organisation or the individuals dealing with it, and yet this endemic problem isn't really acknowledged by the management, or is considered a good thing...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:26PM
... at work. He was a civil service EE at a submarine shipyard.
"No."
That struck me as unreasonable. "Why not?"
"Then I wouldn't be getting any work done."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:11AM
In Las Vegas, that profession is known as a "shill".
I'm not certain I remember this correctly but my understanding is that it's someone - typically a woman - who is supplied with coins by the casino, then plays the slots all night long. Whenever she wins she makes a lot of happy sounds, then plunks all her winnings back into the slot machine. At the end of the night she returns whatever remains to the house.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SubiculumHammer on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:31PM
The way everyone talks here it seem they must think they work for the government: Waste. Bureaucracy. Incompetence.
Oh wait, this shit is in the private workplace?
Here we see the myth of the free market at work.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:18PM
I work for the government. That's why I have so much time to tell other people what they should do. Let it go jackass.
-- gewg_
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:08AM
My employer was never the gov't.
My working days are past.
You are an asshole.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:47AM
I work in private industry. My employer badmouths government, wanting government to just get out of the way of broadcast regional television.
Of course, they really don't want the government to get out of the way - they get paid a lot of money by the government just to have the TV station, which is of course private property of the owner, even if it was paid for by the tax payer.
Meetings. Managers sending emails and interfering by modifying listings without telling you. Warnings for taking breaks so you can be more efficient. Lies.
Fraud.
That's private industry for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:52PM
The think about work time and efficiency is that the think don't work as most assume, depending of the type of work the human has different behaviors that affect various spans like for the attention, concentration and others. There also exist natural work cycles, basically cycle of times off high performance separated by times of low performance, this cycles tend to be only seen in the modern specialized work as in older works those where hidden because the non specialized nature where the different overlapped job activities compensate for it, also the intellectual work is more extenuating that the people think, making the times of high efficiency short.
One think about repetitive work is that somethings that are normally accounted as distraction actually can boost its efficiency, like chatting with others about not work related things, music... the reason is that they act as a mental distractions that reduce the stress that is produced by their repetitive nature of the work reducing the low performance time. This is a more complex think that it appears as it can actually reduce peak performance but at the same time boost the average performance, for example whiteout the distraction you can have a efficiency of 100 during 10 minutes and efficiency of 20 during 20 minutes and with the distraction you can have a efficiency of 80 during 20 minutes and a efficiency of 15 during 10 minutes.
One big problem that I see with most work related studies is that the number off studies done from the management and company perspective are overwhelming and the number of studies done from the physiological and psychological perspective are marginal. Making most of this studies moot in practice as they point the behavior and don't study the real reason of the behavior, making any solution and conclusion misleading.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:17PM
You got to be an efficient work waster.. ;-)
Retiring man admits he 'did nothing for 14 years' [thelocal.de]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:27AM
Alice mocks the PHB [dilbert.com]
You can't afford to fire a top engineer [dilbert.com]
Testing the limits [dilbert.com]
Wally learns the downside of being useless [dilbert.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:55PM
That article could describe a guy I worked with. With changes. Spends his time running a business from work. Spends half hisday socialising. Recruits other bullies. Teases taunts and harrasses people. Anything but work. Proves himself incapable. Repeatrdly. Yes. Seat warming.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:13AM
"Everyone I know masturbates at work." -- Beth Shreve
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:41AM
Hey, where does this Beth work, and can I watch?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:35AM
Donation Station Attendant. She hung out all day in a cargo trailer waiting for donors to drop stuff off.
One of the most attractive women I have ever met in my entire life as well.
One of the most outspoken.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:16AM
Not true according to Snopes [snopes.com].
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:15AM
Maybe you should have continued reading the summary, instead of rushing to comment. Then you would have read the following, directly following in the same paragraph:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Monday June 01 2015, @10:10PM
Haha yes there it is indeed, oops!
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:31AM
Here's a link I found while digging through some of my old files. It's an article describing a related subject (useless jobs, busywork jobs): http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ [strikemag.org]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:40AM
Er, I thought I should have expanded my post a little beyond just posting a link. Here's a relevant quote from the linked article:
...through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
Really though, I recommend that if you're interested in this topic of conversation at all, to read the article I linked. It's very well written, so I won't attempt to paraphrase it here.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!